Objectives

Objectives: Management of the consortium activities and administrative work to report to the FCH-JU. Adequate assignment of resources, monitoring, verification and validation of the results obtained. Implementation.

Work Package 2. Cell Improvement: Advanced materials development and characterization

Objectives:

Development (synthesis) of advanced materials for electrolysis cell’s diaphragms/membranes and electrodes to be used for field testing.

Electrochemical and micro&nano structural characterization of developed diaphragms/membranes and electrodes materials.

Research to improve efficiency by increasing operation temperature and electrolyte concentration.

Research to improve materials, components and systems durability and reliability in order to reduce lifetime costs while optimizing production processes through design optimization.

Reduction of the cell voltage by increasing the operating temperature and reducing the resistance of the cell assembly (membrane, electrodes, electrolyte). The objective is to achieve an increase of stack efficiency of +10%.

Identification of the critical factors for the membrane efficiency (aging, contamination etc.) by means of micro-structural analysis (SEM, FIB/TEM, EPMA).

Work Package 3. Power Electronics

Objectives: Study the effect of the electric power supply topology on the electrolyzer efficiency at full and partial loads. For this purpose, different topologies of power supplies (electronics and intermediate short-term storage) will be summarized, analyzed and classified, in order to specify the technical requirements to build an electrolyzer power supply emulator/prototype able to match renewable energy electricity. Goal is to reduce the electricity energy consumption (10%), because this represents the greatest part of the cost of the hydrogen produced by large (>500 kW) electrolyzers.

Work Package 4. Operation and Maintenance and Balance of Plant optimization

Objectives: Identify technical improvements related to Balance of Plant (BOP), and most of the regular O&M actions, alarms and failures. All subsystems will be analyzed in depth (pressure management, gas drying, water conditioning, thermal management, safety and control system), with the objective to obtain a final re-design of those critical components / subsystems, in order to reduce in 5% the total cost, with better functionality.

Work Package 5. Field Testing and Monitoring of Technology Improvement

Objectives: Implementation of field trials for electrolyzers integrated with RES. Two different installations will be used, for different stack sizes.

Work Package 6. Market Preparation and Dissemination

Objectives:

Development of business cases, identification of potential uses and specifications, standardization, liaising with stakeholders, identification of barriers to commercialization, especially with regard to LCA, RCS and homologation.

General dissemination. Conveying the marketing message to the potential users.